Memory for emotional events is usually very good even when tested shortly after study, before it is altered by the influence of emotional arousal on consolidation. Immediate emotion-enhanced memory may stem from the influence of emotion on cognitive processes at encoding and retrieval. Our goal was to test which cognitive factors are necessary and…

It has been proposed that the formation of episodic associations between stimuli may involve different processes when memoranda are from the same or different perceptual domains, and when stimuli are experienced concurrently or sequentially. Such differences are postulated to determine the degree of unitization of memoranda, and are asserted to…

Memories have qualitative properties (e.g., the different kinds of features or details that can be retrieved) and quantitative properties (e.g., the frequency and/or strength of retrieval). Here we investigated the relative contribution of these two properties to the retrieval monitoring process. Participants studied a list of words, and memory…

The Gesture as Simulated Action (GSA) framework (Hostetter & Alibali, 2008) holds that representational gestures are produced when actions are simulated as part of thinking and speaking. Accordingly, speakers should gesture more when describing images with which they have specific physical experience than when describing images that are less…

Dual-process models differentiate between two bases of memory, recollection and familiarity. It is routinely claimed that deeper, semantic encoding enhances recollection relative to shallow, non-semantic encoding, and that recollection is largely a product of semantic, elaborative rehearsal. The present experiments show that this is not always the…

Four masked priming experiments are reported investigating the effect of inserting an unrelated word between the masked prime and the target. When the intervening word is visible, identity priming is reduced to the level of one-letter-different form priming, but form priming is largely unaffected. However, when the intervening word is itself…

We argue that the semantic analysis of task-irrelevant stimuli is modulated by feature-specific attention allocation. In line with this hypothesis, we found semantic priming of pronunciation responses to depend upon the extent to which participants focused their attention upon specific semantic stimulus dimensions. In Experiment 1, we examined the…

The trigger for shifting gaze between stimuli requiring vocal and manual responses was examined. Participants were presented with picture-word stimuli and left- or right-pointing arrows. They vocally named the picture (Experiment 1), read the word (Experiment 2), or categorized the word (Experiment 3) and shifted their gaze to the arrow to…

Four experiments investigated the novel issue of learning to accommodate the co-articulated nature of speech. Experiment 1 established a co-articulatory mismatch effect for a set of vowel-consonant (VC) syllables (reaction times were faster for co-articulation matching than for mismatching stimuli). A rhyme judgment training task on words…

Previous research has shown that illusions of recognition memory based on enhanced perceptual fluency are sensitive to the perceptual match between the study and test phases of an experiment. The results of the current study strengthen that conclusion, as they show that participants will not interpret enhanced perceptual fluency as a sign of…

Performance in the lexical decision task is highly dependent on decision criteria. These criteria can be influenced by speed versus accuracy instructions and word/nonword proportions. Experiment 1 showed that error responses speed up relative to correct responses under instructions to respond quickly. Experiment 2 showed that responses to less…

Many accounts of working memory posit specialized storage mechanisms for the maintenance of serial order. We explore an alternative, that maintenance is achieved through temporary activation in the language production architecture. Four experiments examined the extent to which the phonological similarity effect can be explained as a sublexical…

Preschool-age children were hypothesized to use one of two criteria, cue recognition or target generation, to make several linguistic judgments. When deciding whether a word is one they know, for example, some were expected to consider whether they recognized its sound form (cue recognition), whereas others were expected to consider whether a…

Three experiments examined generation, recognition, and response bias in the original encoding-specificity paradigm using the type 2 signal-detection analysis advocated by Higham (2002). Experiments 1 (pure-list design) and 2 (mixed-list design) indicated that some guidance regarding the strength of the associative relationship between the test…

In four experiments the behavioral consequences of an involuntary attentional distraction concerning memory performance was investigated. The working memory model of Cowan (1995) predicts a performance deficit for memory representations that are held in an active state when the focus of attention is distracted by a change in physical properties.…